This invention relates to weather radar systems and more specifically to finding storms with an automatic storm finding weather radar without performing manual adjustments to the weather radar system.
Weather radar systems are used on aircraft to detect the presence of storms and turbulent weather. Weather radar detects storms by detecting the presence of precipitation in the atmosphere during flight. With today's existing weather radar systems, pilots must continuously modify the radar controls, searching for reflective precipitation throughout the flight. The pilot must manually adjust the tilt and range to search for storms in the atmosphere. This is a significant workload for pilots. The pilot may be busy performing other tasks and not paying attention to the weather radar. This may result in not utilizing the weather radar to its maximum potential and may result in a hazardous condition if a severe storm were missed.
Attempts to solve this problem have included the use of a terrain database. A terrain database is stored in the weather radar and is used to adjust the tilt of the weather radar antenna to avoid pointing the antenna towards the ground. If the terrain rises in front of the aircraft in the form of a mountain as indicated by the terrain database, the antenna tilt toward the ground is decreased. Depending on the altitude of the aircraft, the antenna tilt may even be increased above the horizontal direction. The use of the terrain database avoids ground clutter and does reduce some of the need for adjustment of the antenna tilt. However, manual adjustment is still required over other tilt angles to find storms.
Automatic tilt functions have been developed for weather radar. These automatic tilt functions compensate for changes in the selected range, altitude, and attitude. Once the proper tilt has been set, the radar maintains the proper tilt by measuring the aircraft altitude. When a different range is selected or the aircraft altitude or attitude changes, the automatic tilt function aims the antenna in the proper direction, leaving only minor adjustments to be made by the flight crew. This automatic tilt function still requires manual adjustments and does not find a storm but just compensates for aircraft maneuvers.
Automating the manual search is desirable. However automating the search for precipitation requires a search algorithm. What is needed is an automatic storm finding algorithm to be implemented in an automatic storm finding weather radar system.